Community Service Read Online Free Page A

to
weekend. Albert would show up, and she’d make him a cup of coffee,
and then they would go out in the yard. He had treats, pastries or
cake, heavy on the icing, at ten o’clock. She always had something
ready for him. She was tempted to offer him leftovers in a
Tupperware container. Marion knew so little of his circumstances.
She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She didn’t want to ask certain
questions.
    He was apparently single, but she
couldn’t be certain without obvious prying…what a pretty pickle she
was in.
    She became less shy. Rather than
retreat back into the house and drool from behind a crack in the
curtains, she had helped him dig up a small vegetable garden, much
neglected since Hank left four…no, five years ago now. Five and a
half to be exact. Slowly she was coming out of her shell with
Albert, painfully slowly as it was. She enjoyed supervising him as
he worked, and then he would pass the time with small talk and
gentle humour.
    Albert took it all in stride, and when
she could no longer help herself, Marion would go in the house and
take a shower, with the window open, humming or singing to herself,
in the full knowledge that he was just on the other side of that
wall, planting a shrub or edging the lawn or hosing down the
driveway.
    She was also aware of the
passage of time. She only had so much of
it, and she sensed that Albert thought
there was some huge social gulf between them. If only the man would
make a move.
    All he had to do was ask.
    Of course, he was desperately poor.
What in the hell did she expect, anyways?
    All of this was madness, and yet it
wouldn’t go away.
    Marion found herself going back over
the weekends and counting up the man-hours in her head.
    One of them had better make a move,
and pretty damn soon, otherwise it just wasn’t going to
happen.
    However it all turned out, she was
kind of grateful to Albert, for reminding her of something very
important. It looked to be turning out all too badly, in other
words much ado about nothing.
    She was a woman,
and Woman, with a
capital ‘W,’ was a sexual being by her very definition.
    What a terribly frustrating state of
being it could be sometimes.
    More than anything she dreamed of
being held in those strong arms, looking into those warm brown eyes
and feeling safe. Feeling wanted—desperately needing to feel like
someone really needed you.
    Marion wanted so desperately for
someone to love her, and it was only now that the true cost of her
professional success was brought home.
    Was that the real reason she and Hank
had problems?
    She found she no longer cared, but it
was certainly a possible factor.
    She was a desirable commodity for a
certain segment of the male population, and the one man she really
liked, for reasons she herself could not fathom, seemed blind to
her.
    To all others, she would
be perhaps desirable but unapproachable. Worse, she would be an
asset, a trophy, an accoutrement. She wasn’t interested in the role.
    A terrible kind of frustration was
building inside of her, and she had no outlet.
    Deep in the gut was the knowledge that
this could quickly turn to self-hatred, and yet there didn’t seem
to be much she could do about it.
    It was another ten or twelve minutes
to get home from here, always with that thought in the back of your
mind that the house would be cold and dark and you didn’t have a
friend or even the prospect of a friend in the world and that a
girl really was on her own sometimes.
    Your thoughts just wouldn’t leave you
alone sometimes.
    Oh, God, let it all be
over soon.
    Finally she turned onto her street, a
pleasant block of two-story houses, once the epitome of
middle-class prosperity but now surpassed and supplanted by bigger,
more fashionable designs, for the most part further out, in more
expensive and trendy neighbourhoods. They’d bought the place
shortly after they had married. It seemed like another life,
once-upon-a-time, and she wondered why she hung onto the
place.
    It